Jack Styler is a young writer who will be joining our newsroom as a staff reporter next month. He’s a Midwesterner; he graduated from the University of Wisconsin two years ago with a degree in history and political science. He wants to make a difference in the world as a journalist, and he’s already had some pretty worldly experiences: leading an English-language summer camp for high school students during the year he spent in Kazakhstan after college (he speaks Russian), working with incarcerated people in the public defender’s office in Madison, and writing about politics as an intern for the American Prospect magazine.
Styler is new to Cape Cod. We told him that even in small towns there were important things to write about. To give him a sense of the job, we invited him to come for a few weeks earlier this spring and do some reporting here. He dove in and wrote articles on some weighty topics: the Provincetown town meeting scene and select board candidate Jere Miller, an outbreak of red tide in Eastham, and the possible effects of an antitrust lawsuit on the local real estate market. He was probably nonplussed, however, when we assigned him to go out and talk to local people about what it’s like to keep a horse here. But he was willing.
Jack’s horse story ran last week, with beautiful photos by Nancy Bloom and a companion piece by Katherine Rossmoore, and it turned out to have surprising resonance.
The article illuminated a longstanding local equestrian tradition rooted in the land and the landscape that has been kept alive, mostly by Wellfleet women, under increasingly difficult conditions. It gave us an inside look at a distinctive part of our local culture that is invisible to most of us. And it inspired Karen Murphy to write her own reminiscence, published on the opposite page.
Murphy’s essay is full of details about the human and equine characters of her Wellfleet childhood in “a simpler time.” Her family kept horses, and there were 55 of them in town, she writes. (The current count, according to Jack’s report, is eight.) Locals competed in the horse shows at the Barnstable County Fair. Some of their horses were celebrities, dancing in the July Fourth parade and cheekily showing up in people’s yards after escaping from their corrals.
I keep thinking about this back and forth between writer and reader. It reveals something important about journalism and community. Understanding and appreciating the essential character of a place means hearing the stories of people who grew up here. Those stories connect us to history — a history that is found not only in archives and old photographs but in the living memories of our neighbors.
My point is not about townies versus washashores, though some may see it that way. Jack Styler is a raw newcomer. But the journalist’s practice of asking questions, listening, and good storytelling enabled him to write a piece that opened a door and invited all of us in.
